Fatal crash occurs after two marked police bikes follow 18-year-old on motorbike carrying machete-wielding passenger
A teenage motorcyclist who was being followed by police has died after a crash with a taxi and street furniture in central London.
The 18-year-old, who was riding the motorcycle carrying a knife-wielding passenger, ran a red light in Oxford Street at about 6.45am on Monday, the Metropolitan police said.
Continue reading...Country needs successful firms to grow and struggling ones to shrink, says Resolution Foundation
The UK needs more businesses to fail, or at least shrink, to solve the economy’s long-running productivity crisis, a study has argued.
The country’s lack of “economic dynamism”, whereby weaker firms or lower productivity sectors shrink, and more productive ones grow, has caused GDP to be 4% lower between 2008 and 2019 than it would otherwise have been, according to a paper published on Monday by the Resolution Foundation.
Continue reading...Researchers explore whether the animals adapt their behaviour in response to people’s happiness, sadness or anger
They are known for living in packs and being sociable animals. Now meerkats are being investigated to see if they can also pick up on human emotions.
Researchers and psychologists from Nottingham Trent University are studying meerkats in zoos to see if they can detect emotions such as happiness, sadness or anger from people, and whether they then adapt their behaviour accordingly.
Continue reading...Thousands of women who have been underpaid by up to £11,000 a year set to launch claim, GMB union says
Sheffield city council is to become the latest local authority to face a mass equal pay claim from women who have been underpaid by up to £11,000 a year, the GMB union has said.
Thousands of women will launch claims against the council on Monday over a “scandalous” job evaluation scheme that discriminates against female-dominated roles, the union claimed.
Continue reading...Co-operative enterprise Vale of Aeron is one of 45 projects to receive money in Community Ownership Fund’s latest round
When Iwan Thomas received the news that he had won a £300,000 grant for the Vale of Aeron, a pub adored by the poet Dylan Thomas when he lived nearby in the 1940s, he was working a shift but had to hold his tongue.
Thomas, the 53-year-old chair of the Menter Tafarn y Vale co-operative group that runs the pub, could not tell any of the regulars until the news embargo lifted. “There was certainly a wry smile, where you know you’ve got something you’re keeping a secret, but it’s a good secret,” he said. “We’re delighted.”
Continue reading...Much-delayed £38.6m project brings works from 1800 to 1945 together for the first time as single collection
A suite of new galleries built to present work by many of Scotland’s most famous artists, including the Glasgow Boys, Phoebe Anna Traquair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, opens to the public this week.
For the first time, the galleries in Edinburgh will showcase significant pieces of Scottish art held by National Galleries Scotland in a single collection, after a much-delayed construction project that involved digging out new space beside the Mound in the city centre.
Continue reading...Manufacturers expect levy agreed in Brexit deal to hand chunk of market to global firms, including China
Car giants including Renault, BMW and Mercedes-Benz have called on EU leaders to “act now” and delay plans for a 10% tariff on electric car exports from Europe.
Renault’s chief, Luca de Meo, led the calls, saying that if the EU did not take action then policymakers would simply be “handing a chunk of the market to global manufacturers” including Chinese companies, which are making significant inroads.
Continue reading...Designer revisits his lifelong interest in science, with iridescent silks and undulating 3D layers
Giorgio Armani may be the world’s most recognisable designer, but as the 89-year-old wrote in his autobiography, his childhood ambition was to be a physician.
While that particular goal eluded him, at his fashion show in Milan on Sunday afternoon he revisited his lifelong interest in science, citing his inspiration for his new collection as “vibrations”.
Continue reading...Grant Shapps says Rishi Sunak ‘prepared to take difficult long-term decision’ when asked about future of HS2 rail project
In Manchester, the first buses to be brought back into public control in England since deregulation in the 1980s have begun their first services.
Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the Labour party “would love to see HS2 being built in full” but that it was “not going to make decisions about national interest projects that involve tens of billions of pounds without all of the information being available”.
Continue reading...Patients have been left confused and frustrated with no centralised system for obtaining medicines
Changes to the way Covid treatments are obtained by those most at risk from the disease could lead to a “postcode lottery” for access, experts have said, with charities warning patients have been left confused and frustrated by the new system.
Previously, people eligible for Covid treatments in England were contacted by their local Covid Medicines Delivery Unit (CMDU) once they reported testing positive for the virus.
Continue reading...Militant pensioner says a majority want a traditional feature but project leaders call row an attack on democracy
Ilkley is an affluent, leafy town, one point of Yorkshire’s “Golden Triangle” where average house prices top £560,000. Last year it was named the best place to live in the UK, and its tree-lined streets hark back to the days when it was a spa town where wealthy Victorians took the waters, Charles Darwin among them.
Now the peace and quiet of this favourite municipality of the middle-classes is being rocked by a row between the, often older, traditionalists in the town and a charitable body of volunteers who were hoping to give it just a flick of a modern makeover. The fight centres on the proposed design of a fountain, to be built at the heart of the town at the junction of its two wide shopping avenues.
Continue reading...The very personal work, owned by Charles I, discovered after being left in storage for years
“A woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen,” wrote the artist Artemisia Gentileschi to a collector of her paintings in 1649, going on to assure him that her canvases “will speak for themselves”. It took three-and-a-half centuries for the name of Gentileschi to triumphantly step out from the shadows of art history, but it has taken even longer for one of her forgotten paintings to re-emerge from the dark. A remarkable find made in a royal storeroom at Hampton Court, followed by hours of careful conservation effort, has led to the unearthing of Susanna and the Elders, a genuine lost Gentileschi.
“It really is super-exciting,” Anna Reynolds, the deputy surveyor of the king’s pictures, told the Observer. “You just could not see the quality of the painting beneath the grime until now, but absolutely it is true and this find has come about as a result of Artemisia’s recently restored reputation. It had been misattributed and left in storage for many years and no one had taken a closer look.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: Fears findings will represent only white population if too few people of colour take part
A major study into the effects of cannabis on the human brain is at risk of being partially thwarted because too few black users have agreed to take part.
White people have come forward in large numbers offering to get involved in King’s College London’s £2.5m study of how the drug may contribute to paranoia and psychosis in some users but not others. It is hoped the project will pave the way for wider medicinal use and make illegal recreational use safer.
Continue reading...Attempt to show Labour as ‘anti-motorist’ at forefront of Conservative pre-election campaign
After a week in which Rishi Sunak rowed back on the UK’s climate commitments and delayed a ban on petrol cars, it seems he is making a pitch to drivers a key part of his pre-election campaign. Here are the wedge issues the Tories are expected to deploy against Labour to paint them as “anti-motorist”:
Continue reading...Celebrities lend their voices to ‘kick the Tories out’ as the party gathers in Bournemouth for the first time in three years
The Liberal Democrats have kicked off their annual conference with a call for people to vote tactically in the general election to remove Conservative MPs, until proportional representation makes this unnecessary.
Gathering in Bournemouth for their first autumn get-together since 2019, a conference rally heard video addresses from Carol Vorderman and Steve Coogan. Neither are party members but they said people should vote in a way to ensure Tory candidates lost.
Continue reading...English and Scottish walkers meet in mass trespass to call for greater public access to land in England and Wales, like the more generous laws of Scotland
Flag-waving activists for land reform have expressed their demands for greater freedom to roam in England and Wales by staging a symbolic trespass through farmland on the Scottish border.
In a bid to highlight Scotland’s far more generous rights of access to the countryside, around 40 campaigners tramped through boggy, dense woodland to arrive at an earth dyke north of Carlisle which once marked the medieval border.
Continue reading...Munira Wilson told party’s conference many men could not afford to spend time with their babies
The Liberal Democrats have said they would double statutory shared parental pay (ShPP) and extend the amount of leave new parents can take if the party form the next government.
Speaking at the party’s autumn conference in Bournemouth, education spokesperson, Munira Wilson, said not enough men were taking leave, while many “simply can’t afford” to spend time with their babies.
Continue reading...Official tour leaders complain that freelance guides with large groups and voice amplifiers are making their job impossible
They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace – but these days Christopher Robin would have trouble making out anything Alice says to him. Official Blue Badge guides working in London say a new wave of freelance tour guides at major tourist sights are deafening them and their guests by using megaphones and portable voice amplifiers.
The Institute for Tourist Guiding (ITG) says its members are increasingly concerned about the unofficial guides who have begun operating this summer around Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament.
Continue reading...Group tasked with overseeing initiative to insulate homes and upgrade boilers was only set up in March
The government’s energy efficiency taskforce, charged with reducing the UK’s energy use by 15% by 2030, has been scrapped months after it was established.
The group, which was overseeing an initiative to insulate homes and upgrade boilers, was announced by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in his autumn statement last year as part of plans to boost investment in energy efficiency.
Continue reading...A new law allows councils to impose on-the-spot fines for emitting smoke
People who live on narrowboats and barges – many on low incomes – say they may struggle to stay warm this winter because an increasing number of councils are planning to fine people burning wood on moored vessels.
Under the Environment Act, which came into force in 2021, council enforcement officers can issue on-the-spot fines of up to £300 to boat dwellers emitting visible smoke from wood burners. Only Sandwell council, in the West Midlands, has so far approved plans to enforce smoke controls along its 41 miles of canals. But three other councils – Liverpool, Newham and Cannock Chase – are planning to start fining houseboats.
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